Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

laughed long and hard as Kelly mimicked Max’s accent. I’d miss her when I went away on spring break, I thought. What? What did my mind just say? Oh, my goodness. I was going. My mind had made itself up. I was going! I couldn’t wait to tell Drew.

      “Ames, you got mail!” James sang as I limped into the house, sore from spin class. They were sitting in the living room, both with laptops on their laps. The picture caused envy to boil up to my throat. I really needed to get out of this house if only just to give them their space. People who were so in love needed their own home. Besides, I just didn’t think I could make it another year being surrounded by all this love that didn’t belong to me.

      “You got a package today,” Kelly teased.

      Atop the pile of mail on the foyer table was a twenty-inch padded envelope. “Who’s it from?” I asked, knowing full well that it had to be from Drew since they’d made note of it.

      I looked at the thing, held it in my hands, and turned it over a couple of times.

      “Open it!” Kelly said impatiently.

      “Geez, give her a break, dude,” James admonished. I thought it was cute the way he called her dude sometimes. She hated that. She told him that it makes him sound like a teenage boy.

      Anyway, I didn’t want to open it with the two of them sitting there, but I did anyway. It was corny. Candy of some sort, guava something or the other. And a letter. I showed them and they did the requisite “awwws.”

      In my room, I sat on the bed and read the letter away from James’s and Kelly’s inquiring eyes.

      He’s a romantic, that Drew. His handwriting seemed as earnest as his words. A flash of doubt ran through me again and I worried that all of this seemed too easy. I needed to hold back a bit. He also sent me a book. An old hardback copy of Wide Sargasso Sea. It was old and dusty, a 1971 edition. Where did he find this? I hadn’t even been born yet when this was published. A note on it said he borrowed it from the Roseau Public Library: “Read it again and we’ll return it together when you get here.”

      I was melting. It was that easy.

      As I was near molten rereading Drew’s letter, the phone rang.

      “Hi, Ma.” I hoped the disappointment in my voice did not poison the conversation because I didn’t want to spoil my mood.

      “Amelia, you need to come over here right now.”

      “What’s wrong?” I assumed the worst. Gerard had been in an accident?

      “Just get over here now.” And she hung up.

      I dropped the letter and put my coat back on.

      “What’s up?” Kelly asked as I ran out the door, but I didn’t even stop to answer. I was afraid. What if something had happened to my baby brother? What if he was in the hospital? Lying smashed up somewhere? I drove through a red light on Columbia Road and a few horns blared. But I didn’t even look back to see what damage I might have caused.

      I pulled up in front of our house, my mother’s house, and a wave of depression weighed me down. I hated that house. I used to love it when my dad was around, but now every time I look at it I feel weary and sad. It’s a beautiful nineteenth-century Georgian house, like many others on the street. Except that ours had not been expensively renovated and sliced into condos. I’d suggested selling it, but Grace Wilson would not hear of it. The house belonged to her Jewish grandmother. And she was very proud of that fact. I’m not even sure she did have a Jewish grandmother. But Grace Wilson holds on to what she can when she wants to. She was standing at the door in a flannel robe.

      “Ma, what’s wrong?”

      “Look at this.” She shoved a sheet of paper into my hand.

      Inside, the house was steaming hot. She liked to turn the heat all the way up to eighty during the winter. My dad fought with her over this all the time when I was a kid. He’d turn it down to sixty-seven, and then she’d turn it right back up to eighty when he left for work. Then they would fight again when the bill came.

      I read the paper twice, three times. It was an order to appear in court. Apparently, my mother’s car had been involved in an accident. She had fled the scene of an accident. I looked at her.

      “You had an accident?”

      “No! Look at the date, Amelia.”

      I did and it meant nothing to me.

      “It’s the day I let Gerard use the car; the day he said he had a job interview!”

      Gerard had a job interview?

      “He told me he’d run into a wall. One of his friends fixed the car the next day. What am I going to do, Amelia?”

      I sank into the tattered couch. I had to take off my coat, it was too hot!

      “Have you talked to him?”

      “No, but I left him a message on his cell phone. He’s avoiding me.”

      She looked defeated and what could I say. They enabled each other’s behavior. This was not the first time she’d gotten in trouble because of my brother’s problems. He’d wrecked one car before. Had junkie friends come over and steal from her. Even had the police come to the house once looking for some friend of his who was wanted in a homicide.

      “What should I do?” she asked helplessly. There was a glass on the table and a bottle of Tanqueray, my father’s favorite drink, next to it.

      “You have to go to the police and tell them you weren’t driving the car.” I couldn’t believe Gerard had done this to her.

      “But…” She hesitated. “I’d have to tell them he did it.”

      “Yes, Ma. What? Did you want to take the blame for it?”

      “He’s still on parole…”

      “Yeah, and you don’t want to go to jail.”

      She sat down heavily. Was she crying? I couldn’t stand that. I didn’t want to see that today. I wanted to go back to my room. To Drew’s letter. To my sixty-seven-degree apartment with my anarchist roommates.

      “What am I going to do?”

      “Ma, you have to call the police and tell them what happened. Hopefully, this accident wasn’t too serious. And it couldn’t have been, else they would have been outside with guns waiting to pick you up. Just call the cops and get it straight. Your insurance is gonna go up and Gerard’s gonna get in trouble again. That’s all there is to it.”

      I was so angry with Gerard that I didn’t even want to think of how sad the idea of him going back to jail made me. How many times was he going to screw up?

      “I can’t do that to my son, Amelia. I can’t do that to him. He’s doing so well with his new job.”

      I sighed. “Fine, then. Take the blame. But you’re gonna have to go to court.”

      I truly didn’t know what would happen to her if she took the blame for Gerard’s screwup. What I did know was that she would do it. She loved him like that. Me, she could verbally abuse all the day long. But Gerard was her little man. She would coddle him till the day he died.

      I hugged her and told her that everything would be okay. Then I went into the kitchen to make sure she had enough food. There was one other bottle of liquor in the cabinet. I stuck it in my bag. She’d finish the Tanqueray, then she’d have no more unless she went to the store, and she certainly wouldn’t go out in this cold weather.

      “Bye, Ma. Call me and let me know what you want to do. I’ll come to the police station with you if you want.”

      She waved as I pulled away. Aaargh! Gerard, just grow up already, I thought. I tried calling his cell but he would not pick up. Fine, little brother, have it your way. I was so tired of my family!

      Chapter